Title: Optimizing the design of wind farms

Speaker: Martina Fischetti
University of Seville

Abstract:
A shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy has been underway in recent years, driven by increasing environmental concerns and sustainability demands from both customers and society. Among renewable sources, wind energy plays a key role in addressing climate change.

As the demand for green energy rises alongside growing competition, innovation and optimization have become essential for success in the sector. This is particularly true in the European offshore wind energy market, which operates on an auction-based system: the company that can build and run a wind farm at the lowest cost—requiring the least public subsidy—wins the auction and secures the investment. As a result, minimizing costs and maximizing profits during the design phase of new wind farms is crucial.

In this talk, we show how Operations Research techniques can help companies become more competitive in this market. Specifically, we focus on two major design challenges in offshore wind farm planning: the optimal placement of wind turbines (to reduce wake effects and minimize location-dependent costs), and the efficient electrical interconnection of turbines.

The optimization tools presented in this work were developed in collaboration with Vattenfall, a leading energy company in North Europe, and routinely used in the company. They were also applied in the design of Hollandse Kust Zuid, the world’s first offshore wind farm to be built entirely without government subsidies, showing the impact of our methodology. We provide results on several real-world instances, highlighting the substantial impact of these techniques in reducing costs and improving profitability, with average gains exceeding €10 million per wind farm.

The project presented in this talk won different international awards, such as the 2018 EURO Dissertation Award, and was finalist at the prestigious 2019 INFORMS Franz Edelman Award.

Bio:
Martina Fischetti is currently tenure track researcher at the department of Statistics and Operations Research at University of Seville, Spain. She holds M.Sc. degrees from the University of Padova (Italy) and the University of Aalborg (Denmark) in Automation Engineering. In March 2018, she finished her Industrial PhD in Operations Research at Technical University of Denmark in collaboration with Vattenfall (lead energy company in North Europe). Her PhD thesis was titled Mathematical Programming Models and Algorithms for Offshore Wind Park Design. Her PhD work on the optimization of wind farm design and cable routing has been awarded various international prizes, such as the Best Industrial PhD from Innovation Fund Denmark (2019), EURO Doctoral Dissertation Award (2018), Glover-Klingman Prize (2018), AIRO Best Application Paper award (2018), the Best Student Paper Award ICORES (2017), and finalist positions at the EURO Excellence in Practice award (2018) and the prestigious INFORMS Franz Edelman award (2019). She was also selected as role model for young women in OR by the EURO WISDOM forum in 2021. After her PhD she worked in industry (lead engineer in Vattenfall BA Wind, specialized in OR) and in government institutions (at the Joint Research Center of the European Commission in Seville, Spain, where she applied Operations Research to European transport challenges). She then went back to Academia, winning a prestigious Spanish grant (Ramon Y Cajal).

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SEMINAR: WED 04 JUNE 2025 16:00-17:00 (AEST, Melbourne Time)/ 08:00 – 09:00 (CEST)
ZOOM MEETING ID: 873 1557 5255; PASSWORD: 778635